Covid Restart Grant 1 – June 2021

The first of the Covid Recovery Restart Grants was applied for via Suffolk County Council’s Culture, Leisure and Heritage department with the actual funds being distributed via local district councils – Mid Suffolk & Babergh District Council in EATMT’s case.

Due to the volume of donations received (mostly in physical archives) EATMT has seen a great need for more assistance with archiving, website securing and updating, marketing and computer updates and security as well as some support to help plan for live events again.

We didn’t receive the full amount applied for but we still made the most of the extra funding and we spent the much needed funds in a wide variety of ways.

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Technical Backup and Support
We have been able to spend some money on a secure daily back up service using a local computer company which was proving more and more vital with a large amount of new work being undertaken between office and home. We were also able to spend money on the website back end and make that more secure whilst also moving the website host and emails over to a more local provider. Whilst this wasn’t obvious for the website user, it was vital that some time and money was spent on making all of our recent additions safe and secure.

Archiving and Administrative support
A small amount of money has been spent on archiving old events and making those accessible to all online though there is still much more to be done here. We were also able to access some administrative help particularly in relation to bringing Stepdancing to two summer 2021 events.

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Future Events – Venue, Artist and Marketing Fees
In addition to the above spending, we were also able to use some of the funds to put towards venue fees for our autumn planned events – The John Peel Centre for an Evening of Song, Redwoods Library for our Sale in September and the Autumn Years Clubhouse in Yarmouth.

The Evening of Song was not able to go ahead – people were still cautious regarding buying tickets in early September 2020 for many events so the fund covered the cost of the JPC deposit.

The sale at Redwoods Library was a great success and we now have a second sale planned for the spring of 2022.

The Autumn Years Clubhouse in Great Yarmouth was used for our Yarmouth Hornpipe event in the end for filming and sharing the event for free rather than running it as a ticketed event – again, an understandably cautious approach was evident in this ticketed event. The artists’ and film making expenses were also covered for the Yarmouth event – The Yarmouth Hornpipe – which we filmed and uploaded on the Trust’s youtube site.

We spent a proportion of the fund on marketing for our autumn 2021 events as well as on producing slightly fuller newsletters for our supporters who don’t have access to the internet and receive a postal newsletter rather than an e-newsletter.

We are very grateful to our funders Suffolk County Council and Mid Suffolk District Council but also to the following people who helped realise our plans:

Individuals: James Abbott, Mo and Lily Allum, Ethan Beal, Gloria Buckley, Richard Cove, Fiona Davies, James Delarre, Chris Gill, Katie Haines, Shirley Harry, Alan Helsdon, Chris Holderness, Barry & Monica Mobbs, Angela Peacock, John Pearse, Jan Robinson, Pam Ross, John Spiers, Miriam Stead, Lindsay Want, Ron White.

Groups: Ben Land Media, Bristol Fashion Band, FolkEast, Harbour Inn Crowd, Hireacamera, Hushwing Band, MSVOF, Strumpshaw Tree Fair, The Autumn Years Clubhouse, The John Peel Centre.

Covid Restart Grant 2 – July 2021

This was a much smaller pot of funding but was very much geared towards ensuring EATMT had the correct equipment to deal with digitising donated sound recordings – from reel to reel, to mini disk to tape and CD. There was also funding in the pot to produce a training session which we have decided to produce as a permanent tutorial guide to be used by future volunteers who might be interested in transcribing and digitising the sound recordings that have been passed on to EATMT.

Once this tutorial is filmed and ready to share, we will update you with details on how you might be able to get involved in volunteering with EATMT.

We are grateful to artist and musician Gemma Khawaja for her advice and guidance.